Are Deaf Students’ Reading Challenges Really About Reading?

TLDR

Reading achievement among deaf students remains significantly behind hearing peers, and recent evidence that deaf students face similar comprehension challenges in sign language suggests that their learning difficulties extend beyond reading alone. The authors conducted two experiments in which college students learned science text passages presented to deaf students in print or ASL and to hearing students in print or auditory formats. Results showed that deaf students learned as much or more from print as from sign, yet performed worse than hearing students in both modalities, indicating that their reading comprehension challenges are more complex than previously assumed.

Abstract

Reading achievement among deaf students typically lags significantly behind hearing peers, a situation that has changed little despite decades of research. This lack of progress and recent findings indicating that deaf students face many of the same challenges in comprehending sign language as they do in comprehending text suggest that difficulties frequently observed in their learning from text may involve more than just reading. Two experiments examined college students’ learning of material from science texts. Passages were presented to deaf (signing) students in print or American Sign Language and to hearing students in print or auditorially. Several measures of learning indicated that the deaf students learned as much or more from print as they did from sign language, but less than hearing students in both cases. These and other results suggest that challenges to deaf students’ reading comprehension may be more complex than is generally assumed.